The Munk Debates Podcast - Lisa Feldman Barrett Dialogue

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Lisa Feldman Barrett joins us for a far-reaching discussion on the science of emotions: in the battle between thoughts and feelings, which determines human behaviour?  QUOTES: LISA FELDMAN BARRETT “People love novelty when it comes to food and clothes etc, except when it comes to each other. When it comes to other people, humans tend to gravitate to similarity, to people who love the same way they do, behave in predictable ways or, or have the same beliefs and values” The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Rudyard Griffiths Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Reza DahyaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I distinctly remember hearing someone yell, stop that van. From CBC podcasts, an investigation into how young men are being recruited and radicalized on the internet. And she asked me if I was friends with a guy named Alec Menassian. By a new supercharged form of hate. On Facebook, police say he wrote the incal rebellion has already begun. A dark online subculture that's spilling over into the real world. Boys like me, available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you. you get your podcasts.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Thanks for listening to the Monk debates. week, we're stepping away from our usual monk debate to bring you a special monk dialogue, the second in our series on rationality. Today, a fascinating, in-depth conversation with internationally acclaimed psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett on how our brains think and the science of emotion. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hello, monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator of these The Monk Dialogues. Well, welcome to our winter 20,

2022 programming, six fascinating talks on rationality. Why do we pick rationality for our winter 2022 focus? Well, I think it's time we do some big thinking on how and why we think the way we do. Are we rational? Can we be rational together as individuals, as communities? What is the role, the importance of rationality in our society today? And why at times does it seem so scarce? You enjoyed our first talk with Stephen Pinker kicking off this series a couple weeks ago. We're now going to go deeper into the field of rationality, but we're going to look at it from the perspective of our brains, how they work. How does rationality emerge in our consciousness, in our society? We have the opportunity to go deep on this topic with Lisa Feldman Barrett.

She's a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She's author of some terrific books, How Emotions Are Made. One of my favorites of the last few months, seven and a half lessons about the brain. She's among the top 1% of most cited scientists in the world, and she's all ours for the next hour. Lisa, great to have you on the monk dialogues. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to have this talk. Ditto, I am too.

I learned so much from your writing, and I want to kind of share. some of that wisdom with our audience today. And maybe, Lisa, you could explain to us just a little bit about what you do as a researcher and a scientist. I want to set up for our audience a sense of how you're investigating the brain and what your kind of unique position that you come from to this topic of trying to figure out how our minds work. Sure. So I run a large lab, which, I mean, is about 25 full-time scientists. And we use a combination of methods, including brain imaging and measuring the peripheral signals in the body, measuring facial movements. We also ask people how they feel and the contents of their thoughts and feelings, which we call mental features,

that that describes basically what your experience is. We also use a bunch of different methods. But our real question is trying to understand how the brain, in conversation with the body and the outside world, constructs your experiences and guides your actions. And that sounds like a really big question and it is. And so we have, I don't even know how many lines of research going at this point, but everything is really designed to answer this basic question. And we take a bit of a different approach, I think, than a lot of other labs. So a lot of other labs will start with rationality or they'll start with thoughts or feelings. And then they go searching in the brain for evidence of how the brain might construct these events. But we actually start with the evolution of the brain, the development of the brain, the anatomical structure of the brain.

And then we ask, well, how, given a brain like this, you know, the human brain, brain that developed and evolved in this way, how does it create these incredible experiences? How does it make decisions? And this, I think, gives us a, you know, a different way of trying to find answers. And we end up coming up with somewhat different answers than other people do. Excellent. That's super helpful. So you're really kind of investigating the brain as a physical phenomenon using different empirical research tools.

And you're really focused. on scientific observations. So that's a great point for us to start with, because that's the topic of our discussion today. Your brain's most important job, it's not rationality, it's not emotion, it's not imagination or creativity or empathy, it's to control your body by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. So unpack this for us, because it's really key to your thinking about how the brain works. And then we can kind of use that as an entry point to get into your thoughts about how this epiphenomenon of rationality, at least as we subjectively experience it, possibly emerges in the brain and through social interactions and in society. I wouldn't necessarily say that rationality is an epiphenomenon.

I would say that rationality is not the absence of feeling. And we misunderstand rationality what it means to be rational by starting with our everyday experience of the idea that rationality is the absence of feeling or the absence of emotion. The absence of feeling is not anatomically possible, actually, for a neurotypical brain. So I won't give you the whole long, very involved story of how we ended up taking this approach. but we really started with the question, why do we even have a brain? Like, brains are incredibly expensive organs. Your brain is the most expensive organ in your body. It takes up about 20% of your metabolic budget and it only weighs three pounds, right?

So that, you know, three pound blob of meat between your ears is like really expensive. And so what's it good for? Why did it evolve? Why do we have it? And the answer really is very clear from the evolutionary record. And it's also very clear from the anatomy of the brain. And the answer is your brain's job, your brain's main job, is to coordinate the systems of your body and keep them running in a metabolically efficient way

so that you can do all the things that you want to do, you know, like eat and sleep and learn new things and eventually reproduce and, you know, raise your offspring to reproductive age. So from an evolutionary standpoint, that's what evolutionary biologists are always really concerned with. It turns out that metabolic efficiency is the most important selection criteria for in evolution. So in natural selection, the most important thing is that an animal's body works in a metabolically efficient way. And I just want to make it really clear. I'm not reducing everything to metabolism.

I'm not saying that any of the other functions of the brain are unimportant or epiphenomenal. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of different lines of evidence from different literatures which show or which support the hypothesis, that everything your brain does, it's doing in the service of, energy regulation. So when we experience things in the world, when we make decisions, when we interact with other people, from the brain's perspective, it's always doing those things with the ultimate goal of efficient metabolic regulation. And of course, I don't experience every hug I give, every insult I bear, every conversation I have in those terms.

But for the most part, you know, our brains are masters of deception, right? They continue functioning and do many things of which they don't make themselves aware. So we're not aware of most of the things that are going on inside our own brains, including this very, very basic function. Fascinating. And just to, you know, reduce that insight to its key point, your quote here, rationality means spending or saving resources to succeed in your immediate environment. So I think that's really interesting.

It's a kind of a sense of rationality, not as some, again, grand strategy or structure, but something that's really at the essence of the functioning of the brain itself. Yeah, you know, the metaphor that I use, because when you're, When you're talking to people who are outside your field, it's often useful to use metaphors. Metaphors, I should just say, are always fraught. There's always something wrong with a metaphor, but you try to pick one that works reasonably well. And the metaphor that I use for this, very complicated process of the brain's regulation of the body, is running a budget for your body.

So your brain isn't budgeting money. It's budgeting things like salt and glucose and oxygen and water, all the things that are required to keep you alive and well so that you can do your most important job, you know, from evolution standpoint, which is to reproduce and raise your offspring to reproductive age. And you can think about almost everything you do in terms of this budgeting process. And again, I want to make it clear I'm not reducing everything. This is not a reductionist approach to science. We take what's called a holistic approach to science,

which is that we consider metabolism and energy regulation. body budgeting, if you will, in the larger scheme of everything else that's going on within a brain. If you look at the regions of the brain, which are most important for language, which are most important for decision making, which are most important for motivation, like just getting up and moving around or the willingness to learn something new, all of those regions are also regions that regulate your body, that regulate your cardiovascular system, your GI system. your GI system, your respiratory system, your immune system, your endocrine system. These are like basic, basic, basic functions.

And so what this suggests is that these very basic functions are really important to all of the psychological things that we experience and do, even though we are completely unaware that that's the case. And our evidence and evidence for many labs now really bear this insight out, I would say, really support that hypothesis. Fascinating. Well, before we unpack how this hypothesis potentially affects how we should think about thinking itself and think about how we think together and the implications of that for us individually and collectively, there's one important kind of myth that you need to bust for us. And frankly, it was a little bit traumatic for me,

Lisa, because I did this grade six project, and you know it on the tripartate structure of the brain. I was so proud of it. I drew a giant map of the brain. I put the neocortex, then the limbic system, then the reptilian complex. And I was told this great big story about how we have these reptilian brains that are driven by primitive impulse, this limbic system that we inherited from the apes. And then this neocortex where my rationality and my cognitive ability functions. And it turns out at 51 years of age, decades later, I realize I'd been completely wrong about how I should understand how the brain works. And this is what you believe, this spurious idea that rationality is somehow in this neocortex.

And this is what differentiates me as a human from every other animal on the planet. Yeah, I mean, there are many things which differentiate us from other animals on the planet. Things we can do that other animals can't do and frankly things they can do. that we can't do. Okay. But the only animal on this planet who has a lizard brain is a lizard. And the so-called neocortex is not new in any fundamental sense of the word. So, you know, the idea, and I think you've painted this idea really well, and it's very, very popular. It's an idea that has so much ideology behind it, that it's almost impossible to kill, even with tremendous amounts of scientific evidence of which there exists. And it's not my evidence. This evidence has been

around since the 1970s. I mean, the irony is that the, what you call the tripartite brain or the triune brain or this idea that our brain evolved in layers, right, that we have a reptilian brain for instincts like, you know, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and mating. You know, this is like a neuroscience science joke, right? The four Fs, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and mating. That's how scientists tell jokes. And then on top of that, you know, evolved this layer called the limbic system, limbic meaning literally border, which is in early mammals and contains the circuitry for emotions like, you know, happiness, sadness, fear, and so on. And then evolved on top of that, layer on top of that is the neocortex, where the cerebral cortex, which is new. And so each of these layers sort of evolved

over time. That's just completely false. Like most of the time in science, you can debate about any statement to some extent until the evidence is in. And I think in this case, the evidence is clearly in. So the brain didn't evolve that way. It doesn't function that way. The idea that your, you know, your prefrontal cortex or that any part of your cortex kind of clamps down on the other two parts like, you know, trying to tame your inner beast is just, it's a story. It's a, it's a morality story, a morality tale that you can trace all the way back to Plato, frankly, and that keeps making its emergence again and again. And in popular culture, it became very popular when Carl Sagan wrote, you know, his

very, very famous book in the 1970s. And the irony is that it was right about that time when evolutionary biologists and particularly molecular geneticists discovered that certainly for all mammals and probably for all vertebrates, the cells that make up any vertebrate brain can be found in any other vertebrate brain. So my colleague George Streeter, the evolutionary biologist, has this really nice phrase. He says, brains are like companies. They reorganize as they get bigger. And so the idea here is that, you know, you have all the same neurons,

all the same type of neurons as any other mammal on this planet and probably any other vertebrate on this planet. but for all animals who've been studied, like all mammals, for example, brains are built in embryos during the embryonic stage of development in exactly the same order. And what's happening across evolution is that the amount of time that is spent in any given stage is getting longer or shorter. And as a consequence, if it's longer than whatever's being developed at that time, whatever neurons are being born, there's just more of them. And so the brain reorganizes.

And so, you know, we can look at a bird brain. We can look at a fish brain, you know, a brain in a hagfish even. You know, we can even actually go all the way back to invertebrates and look at even animals that don't have brains like a lancelet. And but we can find neurons, cells that are very, very ancient in our. own brains. So you do experience emotions. You do have rationality, but rationality doesn't live in your neoportex. Emotions don't live. You don't even have a limbic system, really. That's just not how the brain works. But it's a really compelling story because it's a story about how we understand

ourselves, you know, as healthy, moral individuals. Yeah. And a kind of, I don't know, a Promethean myth that, you know, we're conquering, as you say, these beasts or these demons, these reptiles lying at the core of our brainstem. Yeah, the idea that the mind is at war with itself, you know, that rationality is in a, you know, death fight, fight to the death, with, you know, your inner beast. And if it wins, then you're moral and you're healthy. And if it loses and rationality, you know, is vanquished by your emotions or by your instincts, then you're either immoral because you didn't try hard enough, or you're sick because you can't.

You couldn't vanquish those. You couldn't vanquish your inner beast. And again, the brain doesn't work that way. It certainly feels that way to us. That's our experience, but that's not really, that's not really what's happening under the hood. Okay, well, let's talk a bit about how your research, the latest research, empirical research, based on observations and close study of the brain, actually does function.

Then I think to understand, you say, what you see here, smell and taste in the world and feel in your body, in any one moment, paraphrasing there, are completely constructed in your head. Okay, what does that mean? Well, if you're like me, then when you look out on the world, it seems to you like your eyes are a window on the world, that you're seeing what's out there. If you pinch your skin or, you know, you try to take your pulse, it feels to you like you're detecting something in your body.

You're feeling it in your body. In fact, people often talk about feeling emotions in their body. You know, there's a very well-known book now that talks about trauma, you know, being written in the body. The body keeps the score. But the body doesn't keep the score. Your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard. Everything that you see, that you feel, that you hear, that you can sense with touch, everything is constructed in your brain.

So you don't see in your eyes. you see in your brain. You need your eyes. You need the sensory surface of your eyes to capture electrical signals that your brain constructs into the vision. Right? So without your eyes,

those signals aren't available anymore. But the seeing actually, the experience actually is in your brain. So when you feel your heartbeat, you're not really feeling it here. you're feeling it here. Everything is in your brain. And in fact, when I'm giving lectures and talks,

you know, I'll use, you know, some illusions and sort of examples that have been constructed specifically to reveal this to people. And it's always a real shocker. But it's a really important insight for everyday life, but also for when things go wrong. Like when you feel pain, for example, you feel pain in your head. That's not an insult. That's just how your brain works.

And so this insight is important for understanding chronic pain. It's important for understanding depression. It's important for understanding a lot of illnesses. But it's also important in everyday life because your brain isn't detecting features in the world. It's not detecting what's going on in the world. It's constructing. Your brain is guessing what's going on. outside the skull, so in your body and around you.

And I could, you know, give you some examples. But that's, it's not just my evidence from our lab. It's evidence from, you know, at this point hundreds, maybe thousands of research, peer-reviewed research articles, which make this point. Wow. This is fascinating stuff. And important, really, just to digest this and think about what Lisa has just said in terms of a kind of constructed reality or reality that is mediated through your

brain. So let's take this a little bit further with another quote from your book, Seven Lessons, about your brain. You write, your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you're aware of them. And that's kind of a big deal. That is a big deal. In a sense, you're saying, not only are we constructing a reality in our brain or interpreting it through the organ of the brain, but we're often reacting to that reality, or maybe we're always reacting to that reality, before, in a sense, the sensory inputs of that reality have entered the brain? Am I correct? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. So in order to really understand this, you have to go all the way back to kind of infancy and look at a little infant brain. A little infant brain is not a

miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world to finish wiring itself. And it gets those wiring instructions from the sights and sounds and smells that parents or caregivers curate for that infant, but also the things that caregivers do for the infant, feed the infant, cuddle, the infant, sing to the infant, read to the infant and so on and so forth. And what's happening really is the infant's brain is building a model. It's building a model of its body in the world. Because using a model to predict what's going to happen next and correct, correcting when the model is wrong, is a much more efficient way to run a system than reacting. and the reason why it has to do with uncertainty.

So I'll just say uncertainty is one of the most expensive conditions for your brain. Very, very expensive. So if you hear a loud bang and what is that loud bang? It could be a door slamming. It could be thunder. It could be a car backfiring. If you're in the United States, if you live in the United States like I do, could be a gunshot.

What you need to do to keep yourself alive and well depends on the meaning of that sound. But your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull. It's only receiving through the sensory surfaces of your body, your cochlea in your ear. It's receiving input about this bang, but it doesn't know what caused the bang. So philosophers call this an inverse problem.

You're receiving a consequence, an outcome of some change, but you don't know what the change is. You have to guess. And that it means there's a lot of uncertainty. So receiving the input and then having to guess means that there are seconds, maybe even minutes lost to uncertainty, where the brain has to sift through untold number of different possibilities. that's just super expensive and it's not a really efficient way to run an organism. So instead what your brain does is it builds a model of its body in the world. And then it uses that model to make predictions.

So based on whatever's happening right now, your brain is making a prediction about what's going to happen next. That's in fact how you and anyone who's listening to me right now can understand the words that I'm speaking because we've all had experience. If you're an English speaker, you had a lot of experience with the statistical regularities of sounds and what they refer to, the other signals in the world that they refer to.

And so that's really what brains are doing. They're making predictions. And these predictions are not like abstract propositions. They are literally your brain is changing the firing of its own neurons to prepare you to do something. So it's changing, it's preparing to change the internal conditions of your body to support movement. And it's also preparing you to hear and see and smell and taste and feel something in the next moment.

And when the sense data actually arrived to the brain, the sense data are there primarily to either confirm those predictions or if there's something that you didn't predict, if there's some uncertainty, then your brain would take in that what we call prediction error. We have a really fancy name for that. We call it learning. That's what learning is. Learning is just updating your model. And that's really a very general way of describing how your brain functions, how your brain is functioning right now, actually. So if you and I are are having conversation and we're understanding each other, it's because our brains are,

our brains predictions are synchronized to some extent. And if they were unsynchronized, and it is if they were predicting in, along different trajectories, then we would probably be misunderstanding each other. And that can, you know, as you know, cause very serious problems sometimes. I like that idea of the kind of brain in a black box.

It's the black box is our skull. It's an important, you know, realization because we have these eyes and ears and taste and all this kind of sensory stuff and it all just feels so real, right? Well, it is real. I mean, it is real. It is real in the sense that your brain really since you've been born, it's been learning the statistical regularities, the regularities in the patterns of signals, the patterns of sights and sounds and smells and so on.

And it's that so your brain is modeling the world and modeling your body. So it's not just the world. It's also anything outside the skull, which includes your body. So if you feel a tug in your chest, you know, your brain receives input from the, from sensory surfaces inside your body that there's some difficulty, you know, let's say your heart is straining. What is that? Is it your heart straining? Is it, you know, like the beginnings of a heart attack?

Is it indigestion from having eaten, you know, too much rich food? Is it, you know, related to uncertainty in the world and your brain is preparing itself to learn something new? Like, what's the cause of that tug? Your brain has to guess. And sometimes it guesses wrong. Usually your guesses are pretty good, but sometimes your guesses can be wrong. And that can lead to really tragic consequences, you know. And this is something I talk about in my first book, how emotions are made.

In fact, it's one of the reasons why I wrote the book to begin with. There's evidence to suggest that women over the age of 65 die more frequently from heart attacks than men do. Because they present in the emergency room with chest pain. and both they and the emergency room doctor, you know, guess that the meaning of that chest pain is anxiety. Right. And then they send the person home and she dies. And I just want to say, you know, two things about this because I think it's really important. One is that I know three people whose mothers have died this way.

Wow. And I have a good friend who is also a neuroscientist. his name is Jim Cohn, and he has a podcast called The Circle of Willis. And this also happened to him. He had chest pain that no one could find the cause of. He went to doctors. They said, there's nothing wrong with your heart. It's just anxiety.

It's just anxiety. It's just anxiety. And, you know, after one particularly difficult week, he went home. He laid down. he started to fall asleep. He's really, really uncomfortable. And he remembered a conversation that he and I had on his podcast where I told him this story about misunderstanding sensory signals from the body.

And so he thought, all right, well, I'll go to the hospital one more time. And, you know, because the pain was getting worse and worse and worse. And he went to the hospital and they couldn't find anything wrong. And that's the point at which they would have sent him home. if he were a woman, but he's a man. And so he insisted, no, I'm really, I'm really, really uncomfortable. And so they said, okay, you know, you can wait.

We'll go get a cardiologist. And as the cardiologist was walking into the room, he had a massive coronary called a widow maker. And they had to perform a procedure on him without anesthesia to save his life. And so my point is that your brain is always, guessing. It's always guessing about what the signals in the world mean, and it's also guessing about the signals in your body. And when physicians do tests, they're also guessing. They're informed guesses, informed guesses, right? Yeah. But still, there's always some uncertainty. There's always some

probability that there's more than one answer. And your brain is constantly trying to manage that uncertainty. And so what that means is your brain begins to prepare your actions before it makes itself aware of those actions. And that's why, you know, I just told you an unfortunate consequence, but the fortunate consequence is because that's true, we all, we have baseball, we have football, we have soccer, we have all these great sports, you know, that wouldn't exist, actually, if the brain didn't work this way, if it wasn't predictive. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member.

Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. and you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www. www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Lisa, let's shift gears in our conversation now and talk a little bit about your insights about how we extrapolate these lessons that you've just given us about the brain

and how it actually works to our interactions with each other and to how our society works or not, often when it comes to what we describe as rationality. Let me begin this part of our discussion with another quote from your book. You write, when you really try to embody someone else's point of view, you can change your future predictions about the people who hold those different views. Unpack that from us from a kind of biological neurological perspective. Because I think intuitively, those of us are open to different ideas, and that's really kind of what the Monct Debates Charity is all about.

We get that intuitively. But I think it would be fascinating to hear the kind of biological, neurological, argument for why that is in fact not only an aspiration, but an empirical possibility. First of all, I would say one important thing to remember is the most expensive things that your brain can do are move your body like exercise, right, and learn something new. learning something new is expensive. And I think everyone has maybe an intuition about this because if you're working really hard to learn something new,

like you're working in school or you're working hard to learn to play the piano or you're working hard to learn some skill, there always comes a point where it's kind of unpleasant. You know, you're tired, you're struggling, you know, and you have to really push through that. It's true with exercise. It's true with learning. It's also true with engaging with people who,

deeply held beliefs maybe don't match yours. So that's the first thing to understand. Second thing to understand is that, so I'll just back up and say, feeling unpleasant doesn't mean something's wrong necessarily. It could just mean that you're working really hard at something. Good point. And you have to really push through that.

The second thing to understand is, remember how I said, that uncertainty is expensive. And so one way that we engage with each other is to manage that predictability. So if I make myself predictable to you, then you are more predictable to me. And everybody's brains kind of benefit from that. But if you're unpredictable, if I can't predict what you're going to do next or say next, if you look different from me, if you sound differently for me, if you smell differently from me,

if you have different ideas than I do. If I'm just largely unfamiliar with you, I'm not going to be able to predict as well. And that is going to increase uncertainty for both of us, which is going to increase the unpleasantness of the interaction potentially, right? Because really the truth is that, you know, people love novelty when it comes to to food and clothes and all kinds of things except when it comes to each other. When it comes to other people, humans tend to gravitate to similarity to people who look the same way they do or behave in predictable ways or have the same beliefs and values. But that may be comfortable in the moment, but it's not necessarily the best way to,

to conduct your life. Just like to be healthy, you exercise, so you deliberately expand energy, you deliberately try to disregulate your body so that your brain can find a way to get itself back into a good regulatory state. So your brain throws itself out of regulation in order to work hard to get back into a good state,

as long as it replenishes what it spends. And similarly, I don't know about you, but I've lived in Canada for a number of years. And every year, you know, at the first snowstorm, I would get into my car and I would deliberately put myself into a tailspin so that I could try to remember muscle memory, how to get out of it, just really automatically. So we often will invest energy, spend energy,

actually put ourselves in uncomfortable situations to learn something new so that we can predict better automatically in the future so that we can, you know, not just survive, but thrive. And that includes engaging with other people who maybe believe different things than we do because there may come a time when that information would be really useful to you. And you can look at discussions about democracy, for example, as, you know, a great human invention as harnessing the sort of value and productivity that comes from debate. So in a sense, democracy, which requires engaging with people and arguing and debating,

you know, sometimes great insights and great solutions come out of the fires of intense debate. And that's one of the founding kind of ideas behind the value of democracy. And that means that there's a certain amount of discomfort that comes along with democracy, it's sort of like the price of democracy as Anne Applebaum, a historian, you know, I think it was Anne Applebaum who said that discomfort is engaging with ideas that are different from yours is one of the prices that you pay for democracy. Or if she didn't say it, then maybe I said it in response to something she said. But basically, you know, I'm giving her this insight. And it's a really important insight. So you never know when a piece of knowledge is going to be useful to you,

useful to you or useful more generally, you know, to solve a societal problem. And so just in the same way that animals forage for new sources of nutrients, we forage forage forage for information. And some of that information comes from other people who maybe we, you know, in the moment, disagree with intensely. And so there's a value there. There's also a value, I think, just in terms of our own day-to-day health. I haven't lived in Canada for a long time now, but in the United States, there's tremendous ideological disagreements to the point where people are demonizing each other, really, and it's very serious for a number of reasons, but one of the ways it's very serious is that it's probably contributing to a public health problem.

You know, half the country felt disenfranchised when Trump was president and found it really stressful to have him be president. Stress meaning what is stress? Stress is just your brain preparing your body for a major metabolic outlay because it doesn't, it can't predict well or it's predicting something, you know, they have to do something or learn something or there's so much uncertainty that, you know, your brain is basically trying to prepare for multiple possibilities. And that's really all stress is. So there can be good stress where, you know, you learn. something and you replenish what you spend and then there can be bad stress, chronic stress, where, right, cortisol, for example, not a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose

into your bloodstream quickly because your brain predicts that you have to either learn something quickly or do something quickly. And so it's a hormone that is secreted during stress, but it's, I mean, during a major stressful event, but it's also secreted when you drag your butt out a bad in the morning because that's also a metabolic event, right? So half the country was chronically stressed when Trump was president. But for the four years before that, or maybe even the eight years before that, the other half of the country was chronically stressed when Obama was president. And you're saying that chronic stress is borne out in real physical illness. It's not just simply, you know, a mental state of stress. Yeah. So there is no mental state of anything, which

doesn't have a biological basis. Key point, yeah. You know, so yes, exactly. And the important thing to understand about health or anything to do with regulating your body, illness, whatever, is that there's never a single cause. I shouldn't say never. There's rarely a single cause. Usually, there are multiple causes.

They're all, you know, kind of working together in a network or an ensemble. of like a blanket of cause, if you will. And so if your energy regulation, if your metabolics is, let's say, inefficient or you're living in chronic stress, meaning there's a lot of chronic uncertainty, you're basically paying a little metabolic tax, not a huge tax, but a little one. And those little taxes add up over time to predispose you to, some kind of metabolic illness. And metabolic illnesses are rampant in our society,

not just diabetes and heart disease, certain types of cancer, depression is a metabolic illness. It's an illness also that involves your immune system and involves, I mean, it's really a whole system set of problems, but metabolism is a key feature that has been overlooked for a long time. anxiety, even Alzheimer's disease and dementias have a metabolic basis to them. And again, I'm saying not reducing everything to metabolism. I'm just saying this energy regulation is one key feature, one key factor in a larger kind of ensemble or blanket of factors. And if your environment

is very unpredictable, chaotic even. If you can't make yourself predictable to others, they're not predictable to you. You're living in a polarized, tribalized society like we are today. You're going to incur these metabolic costs. You absolutely are. And so what do you do when you're running a deficit in your bank account? You stop spending.

What does a brain do when it's running a deficit in its body budget? It slows its spend. What does slowing your spending mean? It means you're fatigued. It means you don't want to move as much, literally, right? You're lethargic. You have apathy. It means that you're not learning as well,

that you actually avoid people and conditions that are novel. And that's a problem. And so this was the situation that we were in before COVID. Yeah. And have COVID to that, right? And I'd coach that, but you know what? The stress and the cortisol goes right through the roof. Yeah, and here's the thing that nobody's talking about, really.

I mean, or when they're talking about it, people talk about it in terms of, justifiably in terms of certain segments of the population being more at risk for infection. But for the way viruses work, most viruses, there are a number of factors which influence whether or not a virus can, take root essentially in your cells and cause infection. So there are these really classic studies done more than a decade ago where they took people and sequestered them in hotel rooms. This is work by Sheldon Cohen at Cardi and Mellon University and a whole slew of colleagues.

It takes people, sequester them in hotel rooms, control everything about what they eat and, you know, how much they sleep and so on. And they also control, they place a virus. And in one study, it was a coronavirus, not the COVID virus, but another variant of a coronavirus. And they place the virus in the person's nose. And they're controlling viral load here, right? So it's not like because, okay. So depending on the study, only 20 to 40 percent of people develop respiratory symptoms.

And were those of the people watching Fox News on their hotel television? Well, yeah. I mean, you know, if I was watching Fox News, I would be one of those people, right? But the point is that the people who are watching Fox News, for them it was probably when they're listening to CNN. The point is that a virus is a necessary cause, but it's not a sufficient cause of illness. The state of your immune system, the state of your own metabolism, which is related to your immune system, the state of your brain, these are all. also necessary but not sufficient conditions, right? So there is no simple, single cause of illness in most cases.

And, you know, it's possible that if you're exposed to a viral load, you're basically bathed in an environment of virus, of, you know, high concentration of the virus, that will overcome even a very robust immune system. But the fact is that most people, certainly people who are disadvantaged in our society, but actually also everyday citizens all across the country, not just people who are subject to, unfortunately, subject to adversity. You know, basically just a wide swath of the population began the COVID epidemic or the COVID pandemic in a state probably where. their immune systems were somewhat compromised. And this is just, and so when I say this, you know, I want to make it really clear.

I'm not minimizing, you know, first-line workers or people who live with adversity. I'm not minimizing the burden that, the additional stresses, yeah. Yeah, I'm just saying that the stress didn't begin with the pandemic. It began before that. And so, you know, sometimes you'll, I'll read. read in the New York Times, you know, a couple of weeks ago about how people are feeling exhausted because they're on their fight and flight, you know, circuits are so overloaded. And I'm thinking, that's not at all what it is. Yeah. What it is is that we're living with tremendous uncertainty.

And so brains aren't predicting well. Right. And the uncertainty isn't just about the virus. It's about people's behaviors in response to the virus. If I go to the store, if I go to the supermarket, are people going to be wearing their masks correctly? Do I have a close friend who's having a birthday party for their kid? And, you know, they want me to come. And I think it's unsafe. I mean, all of these things, actually, there are small, little instances, but they add up over time to cause big problems,

including putting democracy at risk, actually. I want to end with kind of two quotes from you that I'm going to maybe ascribe a kind of moral lesson to or from or extract from it, maybe you can resist that. But I think there's something interesting here. I want you to reflect on. The first quote is, people's words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems. And your words have the same effect on other people.

So do we have some kind of duty of care, Lisa, to each other, a kind of a neurological, I don't know, responsibility to understand that, that, that. that words, as you've just talked about, create these metabolic responses, these reactions in the brain that are literally harming each other through how we interact with each other. Yeah. So as a scientist, I'm going to answer this question in two ways. I'm going to answer it in a scientific way and then I'm going to take my lab code off and answer it in a more personal way. So as a scientist, what I can tell you is, yeah, we live in a world where we really prize individual rights and freedoms, but we have socially dependent nervous systems. I mean, scientists don't like to use

the F word, fact, but that's about as close as to a fact as I can probably think of. Okay, we influence each other's nervous systems in ways we're completely unaware of, and one of those ways is by using words. I can text three little words to my friend who lives in Belgium. She doesn't have to hear my voice, she doesn't have to see my face, but with those three little words, I can change her heart rate, I can change her breathing, I can change her metabolism. People read the Bible, they read the Quran, they read poetry from the 14th century, and it can enrage them or it can soothe them. And there's a biological basis for those feelings. So like I said at the beginning of our chat, the same regions of the brain, which allow you to understand and use words, also regulate your body.

That's just there in the anatomy. And this conflict that we live with is there, whether we recognize it or not. So that's me being a scientist. Now I'm going to take off my lab coat and say, I do think we have a duty of care. And I'm not saying, you know, every time I get my self. into a lot of hot water when I talk about this because people think that I'm somehow advocating against free speech, which I'm really not doing. But I am advocating freedom of choice and freedom of responsibility. That is, your freedom comes with a certain responsibility. I suppose you're free

to accept that responsibility or not. But because you have freedom, you also have responsibility. So who do you want to be as a person? Do you want to be someone who adds a metabolic load to somebody else? Yeah. Well, sometimes you do, right? Like, I'm a teacher. I'm a professor. I have students.

And sometimes I am actually adding to their metabolic load on purpose. I'm trying to teach them something new. And maybe something that's hard or something they don't like or something that violates their, you know, deeply held belief. And so I'm trying to support. them though, while I do that. It's just like exercising with a friend, you know, you, you're throwing your body into a deficit position, your body budget into a deficit position, but you're doing it with someone. And so that makes it a little bit easier, literally, makes it a little bit easier. But there are times when we don't want to do that, you know,

And so sometimes people really react to this and they go, well, I'm, you know, my words aren't really, you know, harming people. And my answer is your words are not going to immediately, strongly cause someone harm. But they will contribute to harm for that person over a period of time. And that could happen. And is that who you want to be? Yeah. And just for all of us to think, you know, when we're. banging out those tweets or on a social media site like Facebook, I guess Lisa, it's not

consequence free. You are literally, as you say, three words, you're changing somebody's metabolism, you're possibly spiking their cortisol, you are having a direct physical effect in the same way, I don't want to exaggerate here, but in the same way as if you reach out and push somebody. You know, I mean, the point I think that important to understand is that over a period of time, and again, this is really clear in data, children who experience adversity are more vulnerable to metabolic illnesses in adulthood. Adults who experience metabolic adversity and young adulthood are more likely to experience or more vulnerable to metabolic illness later in life. And the evidence suggests that bullying,

verbal bullying, calling names. The idea is sticks and stones don't break my bones, sticks and stones break my bones, but names will never hurt me. It's actually not true. It's just really not true

because the evidence suggests that verbal aggression over a period of time can have similar physiological causes to actual physical violence, which I know is shocking. And if I hadn't seen the data with my own eyes,

I'm not sure I would believe it either, but I'm sure I'd be motivated not to believe it, but it is what it is. We have, we are social animals. We evolved to have socially dependent nervous systems because for very good reasons. And, but there are also, you know, those reasons also leave us vulnerable, leave us open to unforeseen negative effects. And so one way that you can, you know, I think, protect yourself in a sense from those negative effects is to engage mindfully and deliberately

with people who disagree with you just the way you would exercise you know every morning i throw my body my brain my body budget into a deficit position and then i replenish afterwards that that's exercise and similarly and so why would i do that because if there's ever a time when i need to do something unexpected, but very physically strenuous, I'll be in a better position to do that because I've made the investment in training my body. And you can do the same thing with your brain. So in an ironic kind of way, mindfully, carefully engaging with people who disagree with you is like exercise for your brain as long as you replenish. You know? So for example, during the last federal election here in the United States, I signed up to call people in states that was going to deliberately

put me in contact with people who probably disagreed with me so that I would have a chance to talk with them. And I did that throughout the entire election, partly because I felt like it was my civic duty, but also because I felt like it was a good exercise for my brain because it was a way to engage with something stressful in a way that was under my control so that the rest of my life would not be so stressful every time I pick up a newspaper. I want to end just on a positive note with you, Lisa, with a last quote that says you wrote, Social Reality is a superpower that emerges from an ensemble of human brains. It gives us the possibility to chart our own destiny and even influence.

the evolution of our species. So maybe we could end on that, this kind of the symbiosis between the social reality and our brains and how, in effect, we have agency here. We are not, you know, paralyzed by whatever present that we find ourselves. We need not be overly fatalistic about society as it's revealed itself to ourselves. So I got that. that right? Absolutely. So again, lots to say about this, but I'll just say, give an example, which is the example of money, little pieces of paper or plastic serve as currency because we all agree that it does. So collectively humans impose a function on a piece of paper that give it meaning that it otherwise wouldn't have. And if we withdrew our consent, our agreement, then it

wouldn't have that function anymore. And in fact, if you look throughout the course of human history, all the things which have served as currency have nothing physical, you know, they don't relate to each other physically. So shells and barley and salt and little, you know, big rocks in the ocean and so on and so forth have all at one time or another served as currency just the way little pieces of paper do. Now, even gold or diamonds or what have you have no intrinsic. value, they only have value because a group of people say that they do and act as if they do, and then poof, they do. Mortgages are similar. You know, we draw a line in the sand and it becomes the border of a country only because everybody agrees that it's the border of a country. And if

some people disagree, we call that a revolution. The point is that this social reality is wired into our brains as babies and infants. That's called cultural inheritance. And, you know, we uphold the reality of these institutions by our actions, even without necessarily any awareness. I mean, the last time you order something, you know, on Amazon, or you go to the store and you buy something with currency, you're not aware that you're actually performing social reality and kind of, you know, not just manifesting it, but encouraging it and renewing it.

What that means, though, is that we can modify it also without awareness. And I guess you could say there are probably a lot of politicians who are perfectly aware that this is how things work. But I think the average person probably isn't really thinking about that. When I put my wedding ring on this morning, you know, I don't walk around saying to people, I'm married, I'm married, I'm married, I'm married. No, I just put this little ring on my finger, and that's a symbol to people. And that dictates their actions to some extent in relation to me, only because we all agree, you know, what this little ring means.

When I put this ring on this morning, or when I, you know, when it was my 25th wedding anniversary and my husband bought me this ring, he wasn't thinking, gee, these are little diamonds and it's all just social reality and, you know, which social reality would Lisa prefer? No, no, he wasn't thinking that way at all, right? Similarly, though, I think when in the United States, again, sorry to use so many American examples, but when a very large number of people contested the vote for the last presidential election,

I don't think that they were thinking to themselves, I'm going to change social reality about what counts as a vote or what the powers of a president are. But those powers, the rule of presidency, the rule of king or queen, the powers invested in someone, those are all social reality. We all agree that certain things exist, and then poof, they exist. And, you know, social reality doesn't always trump physical reality. If you and I could agree that we could walk through walls, that won't make it true. We could agree that we could eat glass as food or fly without being in an airplane,

but that won't make it true. But in many, many, many cases, we don't just deal with the physical reality around us. We add to it. And sometimes we come up against it. You know, you can, you know, social reality conflicts with physical reality. You can believe that a virus isn't deadly, but that won't make it true. You can believe that it doesn't matter whether you wear a mask or not, but that doesn't make it true. And I think if we, so there's great power in understanding that as a group of people that we create,

that we create reality and add to the reality of our everyday lives, there's also great peril in certain cases when we mistake really physical reality for social reality. So confusing those two, I think, can lead to great problems. Being aware of the distinction actually means that we can harness one of our greatest powers, actually. With social reality, we built civilizations. And we, by virtue of cultural inheritance, we as a species, have populated probably the widest number of environments on the planet other than maybe bacteria. Pretty impressive.

And it's all that two and a half pounds of mush between our ears. Exactly. Well, Lisa Feldman-Barratt, thank you so much. for this conversation. You speak as beautifully as you write, and I recommend to everyone that they get a copy of Lisa's latest book, Seven and a Half Lessons About Your Brain. I really enjoyed this talk. Thank you so much for the invitation. It was really, really an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for listening to my dialogue with Lisa Feldman Barrett. We'll be bringing you more Monk Dialogues on our podcast feed over the next few months. Conversations with big thinkers like

I.N. Hersia Lee, Daniel Dennett, and Gadsad, to name just a few. For a complete list of our winter dialogue speakers, go to monkdebates.com forward slash dialogues. We also appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please let us know what you thought of my conversation with Lisa at podcast at monk debates with an s.com. Also, thank you to our presenting sponsors and friends at Gluskin, Chef, and Onyx for their generous support. course, to the Peter and Melanie Monk Foundation for making all these debates, dialogues, and podcasts happen. And finally, thank you, our listeners, with tens of thousands of people downloading each and every episode of this podcast. You're essential to our efforts to bring back the art of public conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Residia.

Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.